Hardness of Submodular Cost Allocation: Lattice Matching and a Simplex Coloring Conjecture

Abstract

We consider the Minimum Submodular Cost Allocation (MSCA) problem.
In this problem, we are given k submodular cost functions f_1, ... ,
f_k: 2^V -> R_+ and the goal is to partition V into k sets A_1, ...,
A_k so as to minimize the total cost sum_{i = 1}^k f_i(A_i). We show
that MSCA is inapproximable within any multiplicative factor even in
very restricted settings; prior to our work, only Set Cover hardness
was known. In light of this negative result, we turn our attention
to special cases of the problem. We consider the setting in which
each function f_i satisfies f_i = g_i + h, where each g_i is monotone
submodular and h is (possibly non-monotone) submodular.  We give an
O(k log |V|) approximation for this problem. We provide some evidence
that a factor of k may be necessary, even in the special case of
HyperLabel. In particular, we formulate a simplex-coloring
conjecture that implies a Unique-Games-hardness of (k - 1 - epsilon)
for k-uniform HyperLabel and label set [k]. We provide a proof of the
simplex-coloring conjecture for k=3.